client access: No-mad's Land

Few countries have witnessed as extreme transformations over the last decades as Mauritania. In late sixties, 80 percent of the population in Mauritania lived as nomadic pastoralists, relying predominantly on mobile livestock rearing strategies. 

Severe droughts that swept the region in 70's and 80's largely decimating the livestock of vast number of pastoralist, led to rapid, seemingly irreversible urbanization of the population.  

Today, the rigors of nomadic life are largely thing of the past. Changes in agricultural patterns, drought, transportation infrastructure and the distribution of government services have combined to undermine the nomadic economy. 

The cumulative result of these developments has been a near-elimination of the nomadic lifestyle and economy that thrived as recently as the mid-20th century.